Upgrade Priority: What to Upgrade First
How to decide between Lab troops, heroes, and walls when you can only upgrade one thing at a time.
There's no single right order
Every guide that gives you a fixed list — "upgrade Archers, then Giants, then Barbarian King" — is making assumptions about your army, your heroes, and how much you play. Those assumptions won't match your account. The better question isn't "what's the best order," it's "what's most behind for how I actually attack."
That's the whole idea behind this site's Upgrade Planner: it looks at your real troop, spell, hero, and pet levels, weights them against the army you actually run, and ranks what to upgrade next for you specifically — instead of a generic list that assumes everyone plays the same.
Lab or heroes first?
The most common version of this debate. Heroes are available in every attack and matter in defense too, so they're rarely a bad investment — but they lock up Dark Elixir and downtime for days at a time, and a maxed-out hero at your Town Hall level still loses to a good attacker if your troops can't back it up.
A reasonable default: keep heroes within a few levels of your Town Hall cap so they're not a liability, but don't let that stop your main attack troops from reaching the levels that actually change what your army can 3-star. A level 1 Grand Warden ability is still useful; a level 1 Root Rider dies to things a maxed one walks through.
Don't rush your Town Hall
Rushing — upgrading your Town Hall before your troops, defenses, and walls are reasonably caught up — feels productive because the town hall unlocks new toys immediately. It usually backfires: you're weaker in war (your base can't hold, your army can't 3-star), and farming gets harder because higher-TH loot caps assume a stronger economy than a rushed base actually has.
If you're already rushed, the fix isn't to rush further — it's to spend a while catching up labs, walls, and defenses at your current Town Hall before pushing the next one.
A practical framework
- Heroes: keep them broadly caught up, but don't stall your whole account waiting on one hero.
- Lab troops/spells your main army actually uses: prioritize these over anything off-meta you rarely deploy.
- Walls: cheap relative to their defensive value, and often the most neglected upgrade on rushed accounts.
- Defenses: less urgent if you're primarily farming or pushing, more urgent if you're active in war.